Well, maybe not quite perfection. After all, Simmons isn’t a cat dorm, so you wouldn’t find any furry friends (besides Kaito, the Heads of House’s dog) roaming the hallways. But we have plenty of cool stuff to make up for that loss! Like our famous ball pit and Gymmons, our–

:o

Wait a second.

…

Oh.

My.

Goodness.

…

Could it be? A living, breathing kitty cat in front of me? IN SIMMONS HALL?

Cat!

Omg, omg, yes, yes yes yesyesyes!!! My prayers have finally been answered – Simmons has a cat now! (And what a beautiful cat he is, might I add.)

Pspspspsps, come here, kitty!

What a soft boy

Oh my! He’s such a sweet little angel! And so friendly too! Could this day get any better?

…

Oh wait, silly me – I forgot to introduce myself! Hey there, little guy. I’m Andi. What’s your name?

No thoughts, head empty

Not one for words, huh? That’s okay. I think I saw a sign with your picture on the way in. Let’s see…

Wow, he’s a peer mentor too? He’s certainly making me feel at home in Simmons :D

Well, that’s certainly a unique name, but I like it! Great to meet you, Skateboard!

Welcome to Simmons Hall, Skateboard, and I hope you have a great fall semester! Mine is already off to a great start :D

(Shoutout to Temkin ‘26 for letting me meet, photograph, and post about Skateboard! Without him, this post would not be possible.)

(Also, did you know Simmons will have not just one but six cats⁠01 Actually there are probably more, but I only know of these ones for now this semester? It truly is the best place to live on campus.)

Edit: My inbox is blowing up right now with angry messages demanding that I also introduce some other Simmons cats. Without further ado, meet:

Yuri! (Apparently, he only understands Spanish)

Dumpling! (The “void bringer”)

Created by Amanda Miyares ’26. Art by Summer Moulder ’26. Inspired by GetMIT by Mitchell Gu. Based on 2048 by Gabriele Cirulli. and 1024 by Veewo Studio and conceptually similar to Threes by Asher Vollmer. You can also play the game at the original link here.

(Very) rough counts of windows by dorm (all counted by hand by the wonderful creators of this game ):

1. Random Hall: 96 windows
2. New Vassar: 371 windows
3. McCormick Hall: 442 windows
4. New House: 477 windows
5. Next House: 513 windows
6. Macgregor House: 532 windows
7. East Campus: 555 windows
8. Maseeh Hall: 758 windows
9. Baker House: 800 windows
10. Burton Conner House: 983 windows
11. Simmons Hall: 5,538 windows

1. I live there

Can’t say I’m not grateful for that. Moving on…

2. The bathrooms

My entire dorm research process summed up in two sentences:

I then started my first year at MIT thinking that iHouse⁠02 Actually international development house was a dorm that was really into Apple products. Simmons does have the best bathrooms, though, so I guess it all worked out well in the end.

3. Kaito

The heads of house’s dog. Just look at him – isn’t he so cute?

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4. Chalk art

Although we can’t paint on the walls, we can use chalk to create ephemeral artworks throughout the hallways. Here are some gems from the 6th floor:

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I even drew a giant pigeon mural in my room!

5. The windows

They say that Simmons residents have more windows than friends, but my windows – all nine of them this year – are my friends. Opening their curtains every morning fills me with a sense of accomplishment that words cannot describe.

6. Modular furniture

Each piece of Simmons furniture is designed to fit perfectly with the others, allowing us to create countless different room layouts. My friends have spent hours playing around with arrangements to maximize free space.

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7. The terraces

The epic views and cold winter air are just what I need when I take a break from my 6.046⁠03 Design and analysis of algorithms psets.

This is an old image I just found online but you get the idea

8. The 4AB lounge

Having a lounge space to hang out with friends is integral to my Simmons social life. I like how I could live on a different floor – or even a different dorm – and still go to the lounge and fit in.

9. levator⁠04 We have three elevators because Simmons has three 'towers' that are disjoint from the 8th to 10th floors, as well as a few other floors

This is a controversial opinion among Simmons residents, but we all know that levator is far superior to elevator and Celevator. Celevator is so lame that it doesn’t even get an emoji.

I was a elevator itch last year until it broke down for a whole week, and I had to climb up 10 flights of stairs every day. Meanwhile, levator never breaks down and is always there for you when you need it.

(The one downside to levator is that we’re not allowed to get out of it on the first floor.)

10. The basement (and MPR)

Even though levator doesn’t go directly to the first floor, it does lead to the basement and multi-purpose room (MPR), which then lead to the first floor via stairs. It’s like having a personal highway from my room to the front door!

Bonus speed from doing this route with rollerblades.

The MPR is the only air-conditioned room in Simmons – a great place to be at the start of the fall semester. It also has seats that form a smiley face when viewed from below:

11. Its… unique architecture

A perk of living in such a funky-looking dorm is that I can always find my way back to it by looking at the skyline.

12. The parkour wall

A consequence of Simmons’ architecture is a special curvy wall on the 7th floor that curves at just the right angle and allows me to defy gravity.

13. The Simmons DB

It’s old and written in PHP and crashes more often than I’d like to admit, but it still gets the job done. All efforts to replace it thus far have been thwarted – a testament to its power.

Now with email notifications! (Thanks, Jordan ‘23.)

14. Simdin

Hot take – I like eating dining hall food. Shoutout to Kem for always making the best omelettes and Thupten for running the stir-fry station like a pro.

15. My GRAs⁠05 Graduate resident advisor

This isn’t unique to Simmons, but that doesn’t stop me from being grateful for them anyway. Shoutout to Hope and Elizabeth for all the study breaks and free food!

Popcorn study break this week, featuring 6th-floor GRA Thomas.

16. Rubber ducks

They’re not pigeons, but they’re still cute. And they’re everywhere.

Everywhere.

17. House meetings

It’s a great way to interact with the house government and vote on ad-hoc events to allocate house funds toward. The meme raffle at the end is also quite fun, although I am yet to win anything from it.

18. That one scene in Black Panther 2 where Shuri walked through a blank hallway and everyone watching in 26-100⁠06 The big lecture hall where LSC screens movies clapped

Truly a monument of modern cinema. (My friends strong-armed me into including something about the film in this post.)

19. Gymmons⁠07 Simmons + gym = gymmons , the library, and other facilities

It’s always nice to have facilities easily accessible in my living space, especially when it’s snowing or raining outside.

20. The 4AB lounge again

The 4AB lounge is not just a physical space – it’s also a “social lounge” on the Simmons DB. As a result, we get $30 per member per semester to spend on whatever we want – all funded by Simmons house funds, of course.

That’s right – after running several concurrent simulations on an MIT-inspired neural network (i.e. after thinking about it for a few seconds in my brain), I deduced the entire plot of the film correctly days before it premieres. After all, when has someone on the internet ever been wrong about something like this?

What I know so far

I’m not the biggest Marvel fan, but I still know a few things about what has been revealed to us so far (mostly from watching out-of-context trailer clips and hearing rumours from my friends). In particular:

• Simmons (my dorm at MIT) will appear in a few scenes.
• There will be some car chase on the Harvard bridge.
• T’Challa won’t feature much in this film (because Chadwick Boseman died ).
• Ironheart/Riri Williams will be involved in the plot somehow.
• Fish people(?)

This information may seem like not a lot to work off of, but I assure you that it’s more than enough to infer a cohesive plot with near certainty. Without further ado…

What will most definitely happen

The film starts with T’Challa walking with a group of reporters along a concrete bridge in Wakanda, recapping the events of the first Black Panther film. Suddenly, the bridge collapses, killing everyone.

This event shocks and confuses Wakanda, but the cause of the collapse quickly becomes apparent – centuries of isolation had left the nation in the dust in terms of concrete technology! (At that point in the film, they’re about on par with the ancient Romans.) Furthermore, it’s becoming increasingly evident that their overreliance on vibranium – a rare and non-renewable resource – is hopelessly unsustainable. In fact, the carbon emissions and runoff pollution from their mining operations cause the king of the oceans to attack Wakanda in a desperate bid to slow down climate change.

Wakanda at the end of the first film. Note the structural instabilities due to a lack of concrete

Clearly, Wakanda needs an infrastructure overhaul. These incidents inspire Shuri to pursue her repressed passion for architecture and civil engineering to prevent such tragedies from happening again. And where better to study architecture than at the first architecture college in the US?

At MIT, she chooses to live in Simmons because of its striking design and gravity-defying overhangs.

What Shuri thinks when she first sees Simmons

There, she meets Riri “Ironheart” Williams, a fellow first-year student wanting to study metallurgy at MIT (hence her name). Through Riri, Shuri learns that the dorm’s funky shape is possible thanks to reinforced concrete – concrete embedded with steel bars and wires. While Riri excitedly explains how the hybrid composition of reinforced concrete combines the best of steel and regular concrete, Shuri silently hatches a plot to take Riri and her seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of composite materials to Wakanda, whether she wants to or not.

This then leads to the famous scene showing the interior of a Simmons dorm room, which transitions to a car chase on the Harvard bridge. Although the trailers made these two scenes look like action sequences, they’re actually both part of a five-minute-long educational segment about how modern engineering techniques have vastly improved the safety of the bridge throughout its 131-year life.

The sequence ends with a handy diagram showing the types of bridges (and helpfully points out that the Harvard bridge is a steel haunched girder bridge)

Fortunately, Shuri realizes that learning from and collaborating with Riri at MIT would be far more effective than her original plan, so she calls off the chase and the two reconcile. A few days later, they even become roommates in Simmons!

A montage of Shuri doing stereotypical MIT student things then plays as she narrates her MIT undergrad experience. Along the way, she finds a UROP⁠08 Undergraduate research opportunity at MIT’s Concrete Sustainability Hub, where she starts experimenting with infusing vibranium nanoparticles with concrete. Lo and behold, it works! Thanks to some convenient properties of vibranium, the metal matches the coefficient of thermal expansion of the surrounding concrete, leading to a form of ultra-reinforced concrete that is also self-healing and passively absorbs greenhouse gases for some reason. (The reason given in the film is “quantum eigenvector flux resonance” or something like that.)

Finally, ultra-reinforced concrete (which conveniently has every material property we want because the plot requires it)

Flash forward a few years, and we see how this marvellous invention has impacted the world. Shuri and Riri had created a startup – Black Panther Industries (named after the late T’Challa) – specializing in next-generation construction services, which quickly became one of the most valuable companies in the world. Thanks to them, Wakanda is now a hub of engineering excellence and, more importantly, sustainability (a subtle nod to the subtitle Wakanda Forever).

This is what Wakanda looks like now (could you tell which dorm Shuri and Riri lived in?)

The movie then ends with the pair gazing wistfully into a Wakandan sunset as Concrete Jungle by Bob Marley plays in the background, and the credits start to roll. (Naturally, there’s a post-credits scene – this time about Ant-Man discovering that transmission electron microscopy can accelerate the development of the nanotechnology powering his suit.)

~~~coincidence?~~~

Yeah, probably.

I want to talk about The Dorms though, because, a) It’s housing renewal season so I’ve been thinking a lot about where I want to live, and b) CPW is this week, so if you’re a prefrosh you’re likely going to be checking them out and maybe even staying in one (yay!).

Full disclaimer: This is going to be mostly about Maseeh because that’s my current home, but I’ve also spent a year each in Simmons and Baker, so if you have any questions about them feel free to ask in the comments!

3 Best Parts of living in Maseeh

1) It’s new. Or at least it feels that way. Maseeh used be a swanky hotel in the early 1900’s, then it was a grad dorm for 70 years, so it’s only had undergrads since 2008. It still has a hotel-ish feel, or at the very least you can’t tell that thousands of ~20 year olds have lived here.

2) The proximity. All of my classes are just across Mass. Ave. This wasn’t something that I considered when moving in, but being able to leave for class 3 minutes before it starts has been a game-changer.

3) Dining. There is a constant stream of food from the Howard Dining Hall.  Maseeh is the only dorm that serves lunch, and it also does late night dining. Translation: you could eat practically non-stop from 8:00AM until 1:00AM if your heart desires.

3 Not-the-Best Parts of living in Maseeh

1) You need your MIT ID to access the stairs/elevator. This is petty and I get that dorm security is a thing, but I’m always afraid of forgetting my ID and being trapped in the lobby for all eternity.

2) White walls. There’s a lot of them. On the plus side, it really motivates you to add your own posters etc. to your room.

3) No river. This is also a minor inconvenience that is very specific to our room since we live on the wrong side of the hall, but it matters to me so it’s on the list. Last year in Baker I had a room facing the Charles River and I miss that this year. In the winter I could watch snow fall on the frozen water, and in the spring I would wake up every morning to the sound of crew teams rowing up and down the Charles (…as well as the charming sounds of rush hour traffic on Memorial Drive. You win some, you lose some).

3 pictures of my room

This is sort of what my room looks like. For being nearly a square, it was way too hard to take pictures of.

This is my corner. My aesthetic is semi-organized chaos.

Cindy S. ‘20 demonstrating proper use of the bean bag. Also, we have 3 windows(~~~coincidence?~~~)

Hallway/desks/wardrobes/fridge

3 key features of my room

1) Fireplace. There are a few unique parts of Maseeh, and the non-functional fireplaces are one of them. Ours is covered by the futon in the second picture above, but this is what it looks like:

2) Random pillar. We were blessed with this lovely, awkwardly- located pillar. We use it to hold calendars and sticky notes and the like:

3) Floating cubes! Everyone gets a little wheelie storage/moving desk cube thing. Clearly they are hard to describe in words, so here’s a pic:

3 pictures of the basement

I spend a decent amount of time in the basement, because why not. There’s food, water, entertainment, and places to study, so I’m actually not sure why I ever leave. (not pictured below: kitchen, music room, media room, computer cluster).

1) Weight room. For when you have the motivation to work out but not the motivation to walk 3 minutes to the Z Center:

2) Study areas. There are many study rooms and spaces in the basement. I picked this one because I like the chairs:

3) Room of Requirement. I have no idea what this room is actually called, but it does it all. What do you want to do? Erg/elliptical/bike/run? Watch TV? Play pool? How about piano? Maseeh basement has you covered:

There’s also a refrigerator and a cotton candy machine (not pictured, because I still don’t know how to take pictures of square rooms).

3 general questions I had about the #dormlife that I now can answer (my biggest question was/still is “Should I be on the meal plan?”, but since I still have no idea I’m saving that one for later):

1) Do I need a mini fridge? Are you on a meal plan? If the answer is yes, I would try to coordinate with your roommates to share one. All dorms have communal fridges (Maseeh has 3, of course), My triple has one fridge and it’s been just fine.

2) Is Simmons too far? Classic. I’ve heard many theories on this one, but my answer is no (and that’s coming from someone who now lives in The Most Convenient Dorm of Them All). The academic buildings aren’t as far as they look, and it’s actually pretty close to the Z Center and Student Center so what more do you need. Also, there’s a Tech Shuttle that you can take around campus when it’s freezing cold/dumping rain/some unfortunate combination of the twain.

3) Where do I store my stuff in the summer? As someone from a land far, far away, this was a pressing question freshman year.

My freshman answer: a storage unit in South Boston. This was the incorrect answer holy moly. I had no car and many boxes. Would not recommend.

My older, wiser sophomore answer: moving services that come to your dorm, pick up your boxes, store them, and then return them to you in the fall! This is the correct answer. It ends up costing about the same as self- storage and you don’t need to ride an hour on the Orange Line. You’ll be bombarded by these services in the spring, so it’s not hard to figure out (Side note: some dorms have free in-dorm storage. I don’t have a complete list, but if your dorm does, then this is the Ultimate Correct Answer! Unfortunately Maseeh and Baker do not)

3 fun CPW events at Maseeh!
If you are attending CPW (yay!) which is very soon (yay!) you should read Yuliya K.’s latest posts (CPW: how and why) because they contain all that you need to know on Previewing the Campus this Weekend (yay!).

Here are a couple of events that Maseeh is hosting that sound fun:

1) McDonald’s and Reddit (Thursday). Pretty sure this is exactly what it sounds like.

2) S’mores! (Friday). I love s’mores. You love s’mores. Everyone loves s’mores.

3) Waffle Bar (Saturday). This was officially described as “Maseeh’s Famous Waffle Bar!” so you know it’s about to be good.

Simmons has been velociraptor free since 2002. They are the only dorm that guarantees no velociraptors attacks. The first time I set foot in Simmons was during CPW when I was given a tour around the Sponge. During the tour I got see their athena cluster,

their famous ball pit,

blocky cushions,

hammocks,

kitchionettes (usually a couple per floor)

a small library

and a koi fish pond (with rubber ducks instead of koi fish)

Oh, and every room comes with one of these cubes for reasons.

Oh man, I got lost so many times. See, Simmons is made up of three adjacent “towers” smushed together. There are 10 floors total, and on some floors A tower and B tower are connected while C isn’t. Once you get to the upper floors, A, B, and C towers are all separated, and at that point people actually start calling them “towers”. The floors that are connected all the way across are the first, second, fifth, sixth, and sometimes seventh floor. There were times, when I wanted to visit my friend on the same floor, I had to go down a level, walk to the end of the building, then walk up back to the same level.

For my FPOP and half of orientation, I lived on the floor 3C. My dorm room was shaped like a triangle. A triangle. What better way of proving that your college is quirky than by saying you live in a triangle? I had the room for myself for the first few days since I was at MIT a week early for DEECS, the electrical engineering and computer science FPOP. My roommate, who I met on Facebook over the summer, arrived at the end of the week, just before orientation started. As our second week went by, we started playing pool on the second floor with a couple of other guys.

When final assignments came out, we were all together in 5A. In fact, 5A, for the first time as long as the GRT’s could remember, was now all guys, with at least nine of us. We started calling ourselves a fraternity within Simmons, then someone made a joke about wanting us to have Greek letters like real fraternities, and then I made us Greek letters, and in a few days we had shirts with our logos on them.

Next year it got bigger

Oh dear, what have I started?

Just before 9 pm on February 28th, the 18,239th and final piece was placed into the puzzle in private dining. In all of the reviews that I saw while doing research on this puzzle, nobody was able to finish in less than 8 months. It took Simmons 40 days and 5 hours.

I am incredibly grateful for the help and support that so many people provided in order to make this the success that it was. To most of you, this puzzle probably ranged somewhere from a pleasant distraction to a moderate disturbance, but to me, it was a reminder of why I had come to love Simmons so much over the last two and a half years.

About two months ago, I approached our outgoing and incoming presidents-Kate and Yuge-with a crazy idea: what if we ordered a 34,000 piece puzzle to leave out in Simmons for people to solve over IAP? If this were anywhere else, they probably would have chuckled at the joke that I had just made. But this is Simmons, so they knew that I was dead serious, and they responded with a level of excitement that I’ve come to expect during my time here. After an enthusiastic conversation about jigsaw puzzles and some negotiations over the size of the one that we would be getting, we had one picked out and ready to order.

The first day was a huge success. After an hour in which nobody showed up, followed by another hour in which my friends from Party Lounge were the only people around, people finally started showing up in the numbers that we had been hoping for. A group of six of us worked for most of the evening and didn’t call it quits until well into the night. We didn’t put in as many pieces as I had expected that day, but the ultimate takeaway was a good one: if a group of people that I had never met were willing to put hours of their day into working on this project, then there was no doubt in my mind that this was going to get done.

People’s level of interest was a truly amazing thing to see. Everyone from my friends, to most of the dining staff, to President Reif stopped by at one point or another to check up on our progress. After a while, I couldn’t have a conversation with anyone in the dorm without the puzzle inevitably coming up. I quickly lost count of the number of times that I had to tell people that there were 18,000 pieces or explain that we only had half of the edges because the puzzle came in four sections. Yet, it never got old, because I was amazed at how many people were willing to express their interest in a project that appeared so mundane.

Soon, people from throughout the Simmons community were doing whatever they could to make this a success. Nika made arrangements for us to be able to use dining, private dining, and late night throughout the time that we had the puzzle out. Josh ordered some Insomnia Cookies to get more people involved in the cause. Ellen donated a light and provided us with a great 7K display to generate support. Joseff took a time lapse of a substantial portion of the process and got photos of the end. House Government gave us a $500 budget to spend on food to support the cause. Residents from throughout the dorm provided us with lights, a magnifying glass, speakers, and a slew of other things to help make the process as successful and enjoyable as possible. And, of course, dozens of people managed to find time in their busy schedules to stop by, put in some pieces, and make the process go just a little bit better.

When we were in the process of putting in the final pieces earlier tonight, I took the time to look around at the group of people who were still working on this after almost 6 weeks. I saw one of the first friends I made when I got to MIT, a few people that I had gotten to know well over the past year or two, and several close friends that I hadn’t even met just two months ago. Only Simmons can do that well of a job of bringing people together.

So thank you everyone who helped to turn this crazy thought into a reality. I’m convinced that Simmons is one of the only places in the world that could successfully provide the manpower, the resources, and the general culture of optimism and enthusiasm needed to successfully pull something like this off. And for that, I will always be grateful.

Thank you.

As Vincent mentioned, the MIT Class of 2019 freshmen are currently out and about enjoying their first week orientation at MIT.

During Orientation, freshmen learn about academic requirements and extracurricular clubs and activities. They also learn about the resources available to them for help and support throughout the year like MIT Together, MIT Mental Health, and Student Support Services. We have events on diversity, what it means to be an MIT student, and how to find support and push through hard times. We even have a play put on by students to provide useful information about topics like sexual assault and alcohol. Lastly, the freshmen are placed into groups, each with an orientation leader, to be their guide for the week for any questions and concerns they may have about navigating their first year at MIT. This year I’m excited to be an orientation leader for a group of twelve freshmen (GO Purple 48! You know who you are) and will be sharing with them the many things I’ve learned at my time at MIT.

Alongside Orientation is REX (Residence Exploration), where dorms across campus put on many unique and interesting events to give freshmen more chances to experience a dorm’s culture and style before choosing a permanent residence for the year. Some events even become iconic and famous, like the East vs West Water War on Tuesday or East Campus’ yearly courtyard build project. This year, they built another wooden roller coaster, but this one is much more special than last year’s (you might hear about it in the news).

Simmons is hard at work as well, preparing for the Water War and for the Top of the Sponge roofdeck party. It’s funny to think how I was attending these events with my friends as a freshman and now, as a junior, we’re the ones running these events for the new freshmen. Here’s the REX schedule for the events my friends back at Simmons have worked hard to make:

It’s been a while! Much has happened since my last post – I stopped being a teenager, I went to San Diego, I discovered Rebecca Black (and am forever scarred) and I received a surprise care-package from my mom (contents: Best of Mr. Bean DVD), to name a few things. But I’ll have to save those for another post because we have more pressing matters at hand today:

1. Yesterday was Monday*
2. Today is Tuesday
3. Tomorrow is Wednesday
4. And Thursday comes afterwards. Which means it’s CPW! Funfunfunfunfunfunfun! We so excited! We gonna have a ball!

No really, you guys should be excited. Why? Well, I’ll tell you why in the following video, you goobers!

Come see Simmons! Come meet the bloggers! Come to Battle of the Bands! We gonna have fun, c’mon, c’mon y’all!

Team Elizabeth out.

P.S. Sorry Mikey

*Note: I totally drafted this post on Tuesday and I acknowledge that today is actually Wednesday, but for now let’s just pretend so we can annoy Mikey.

P.P.S. Sorry Mikey

…and then there’s Simmons. Every dorm has a good and bad reputation. Our good rep? We have really nice facilities. It’s clean. It’s big! It looks cool. And the people are nice. Our bad rep? We lack personality. We’re tame. And while we’re nice, we’re… *gasp*… allegedly-boring. Personally, I love Simmons. I like being able to come “home” at the end of the day and get work done if I need to, without being too distracted or bothered by people playing Rock Band really loud at 3 in the morning. Simmons is about as close to “apartment-style” living as you can get in the dorms. This year I blocked with some friends from my freshman year and we added some super freshman to our hall. I live with my pals but I still get to do my work in peace. In short, I like it here.

So without further ado, here’s a video about life on 3AB (the AB refers to towers. Simmons is divided into three towers, A, B and C. My floor has both towers A and B connected to each other), Simmons Hall: